


still crazy after all these years

by torigates



Category: Bones (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-11
Updated: 2013-11-11
Packaged: 2018-01-01 03:45:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1039972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/torigates/pseuds/torigates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>10 things about Jack Stanley Hodgins IV</p>
            </blockquote>





	still crazy after all these years

1.

 

Jack’s earliest memory is of Donna, his nanny. She was a hard, no-nonsense woman who made him say, ‘finished’ and not ‘done’ and would force him to stand with his nose pressed up against the wall, hands folded behind him whenever he got into trouble (which, considering the amount of time he spent playing in the dirt, was a lot).

In fact, he has no solid memories of his parents until the age of four, and try as he might there is just nothing there in the place he expected them to be. He does remember being six years old and running to greet his mother when she was unexpectedly home one day after school, and the sharp, harsh sound of her voice as she simultaneously scolded him for running in the house and called for Donna to take him away.

Later, when they were gone, Jack didn’t know how to feel regret. He went from nanny, to boarding school to orphan.

 

2.

 

Everything was clean in the Hodgins’ Estate (as it should be with a team of over a dozen ‘support crew’ as his mother called it, “Servants,” his father would correct.

“Jack,” his mother would scold, to which his father would roll his eyes and tell her to call a spade a spade). There was no room for little boys who liked to play in the dirt (or not-so little teenagers fascinated with bugs and grit and slime).

Hodginses were doctors or lawyers or investment specialists. They dated nice girls from proper families and they socialised with the right kind of people. Everything was neat and clean and proper and in its own place—or at least it appeared to be.

Jacked hated the superficiality of it all, the way people would smile politely at him and then whisper about the strange Hodgins boy who liked bugs, and wasn’t it a shame, what _would_ his mother say, may she rest in peace.

It all made Jack want to scream and smash things and rip open their gleaming superficial surfaces to the dirt that was there underneath, because dirt—dirt was always there, at the core.

 

3.

 

Jack knew something was wrong the moment they called him into the principal’s office and the guidance counsellor was there along with a cop.

The second sign was when the principal said, “Sit down, son.” That man hated Jack because Jack was smarter than him.

He looked at their grim faces, and knew, even before the words were spoken aloud. It was an expression Jack would become intimately familiar with; and expression that expressed condolences without meaning it, an expression that was sad, but didn’t quite touch the eyes. For a long time Jack thought that was what sympathy really looked like, and he hated it.

The cop said, “There’s been an accident,” and the world rushed through his ears all at once and he didn’t hear anything else for a long time.

(When he thinks back on it now, Jack is pretty sure it was this moment that rooted a lot of his mistrust in police officers in particular, and authority figures in general. They never brought anything but bad news.

It was this moment that stalled his friendship with Booth for a long time, and sometimes when he let himself think about it, he wondered how his life might have been different if someone like Booth had broken the news to him.)

Suddenly he was sixteen without any access to his trust fund. And he hated, _hated_ his parents. Hated them for leaving him behind, for abandoning him at a prep school, for leaving him in his uncle’s care, he hated everyone and everything around him, hated the way they all whispered whenever he walked by. He hated, hated, hated.

One day his therapist told him, “The world isn’t out to get you, Jack. This isn’t a conspiracy,” and Jack thought, ‘That’s exactly what the whole goddamn world is,’ and just like that he found something new to believe in, when everything else around him was nothing but a pile of shit.

 

4.

 

Jack was angry for a long time. He was angry for a long time, and at everyone around him. Sometimes it was hard to remember a time when he _wasn’t_ angry.

Terry was his college roommate. Jack liked him because he never told Jack to calm down or complained about Jack’s ranting. He was Jack’s best friend. Between him and Clarissa, Jack fooled himself into thinking good things could happen again. He was wrong.

“I’m sorry, Jack,” she said, and Jack looked back and forth between their sad eyes and the way they held hands, like they weren’t ashamed.

“Oh,” he said, rising to his feet. The two of them stayed where they were, and this only made him angrier. They shared a look like they knew this was going to happen, and Jack had to literally restrain himself from hitting one of them. Instead, he paced.

“Jay,” Terry started.

“No.” Jack couldn’t believe how cold his voice sounded. “No, Terry. I see how it is. You two get the hell out. I don’t ever want to see you again.”

They left and never came back. After they were gone, Jack put his fist through the wall and smashed all the pictures he could find. He stood, glass shattered at his feet and didn’t feel any better.

(Of course, they called. Both of them, pleading with him to forgive them, to let them _explain_ , like there was something they could say that would somehow make it all okay. “Jay,” Terry’s voice rang out over the answering machine. “Please, buddy.” There was a long sigh followed by a longer pause. “Look, I get it. I get why you can’t forgive us. But just remember that you were the one who walked away. Not us.” The click that followed was the last thing Jack ever heard from Terry. He stared at the blinking new message light for a long time before finally deleting it.

He never called them back.)

Ten years later, Terry was dead.

 

5.

 

Jack was arrested.

Actually, it went like this: he was in three bar fights, where the bar tender _warned_ him that if it happened again he was going to call the cops on Hodgins’ ass, and _then_ he was arrested. He figures it was the end result that only really mattered.

He stood before the judge who just stared at him for a long, stony moment, like he didn’t know Jack’s father, like he wasn’t at their house every year for Christmas before his parents died. Then he announced the verdict and banged the gavel loudly. The sound was still ringing in his ears, along with his sentence as his lawyer hustled him out of the courtroom.

_Six months in prison or court mandated anger management._

Sitting in his first meeting, each person in the room met his gaze, some smiling, some looking just as angry—or angrier—than his own, Jack thought he might actually prefer prison.

In the end, he sometimes thought anger management saved him, even when he didn’t want to be saved.

Years later, when he didn’t have as many reason to be angry, he still wore the green elastic band around his wrist and snapped it when things got out of control, the sharp pain reminding him that he was only human.

 

6.

 

Hodgins was leaving the Jeffersonian late one night, when he saw a light on in the lab, and figured it was one of the techs messing around with his samples. They were always doing that, and it _pissed Jack off_.

He stormed over, already annoyed. Nothing that day was going well. He saw Zack tinkering around on the platform. “What are you doing?” he asked.

Zack looked up, and Hodgins remembered being surprised at the surprised look on Zack’s face. Jack didn’t know that Zack could feel, let alone express emotions. He’d never said two words unrelated to work.

“Oh,” Zack said, and Hodgins looked down to the toothbrush dangling in his hand, to his tousled hair, and for some reason the idea just _came_ to him.

“Are you _living_ here?” he asked, already aware what the answer was going to be.

Zack stared at him for a long moment. The look on his face was a cross between abandoned puppy and dear in headlights. “My roommate kicked me out of the dorm,” Zack finally admitted. “He said I was weird.”

Hodgins stared at him for a long time, taking note of the way Zack wouldn’t make eye contact, the way his shoulders were slumped, resigned to his fate, and he couldn’t help but notice how _young_ Zack looked. He remembered being lost and scared and alone in grad school, and how he never would have made it through if it weren’t for Terry and Clarissa, and for a minute, his heart just _hurt_.

He knew what it was like to be the weird kid in grad school, with the obscure interests and lack of people skills. It was fucking _hard_. The least he could do was offer the kid a place to sleep, it wasn’t like he had to be his best friend, or anything. He just nodded over his should. “Come on.”

And that was how he ended up living with Zack.

It wasn’t so bad, all things considered. Zack never asked him any questions about his house or his money or his past.

Sometimes, after everything, Jack wondered if he could have prevented it by talking to Zack more. To making him more normal, but Jack was hardly a person himself, and what did he know about being normal?

Still, he wondered. Sometimes.

 

7.

 

_Up and forward are only two directions. Science should look in all directions. You taught me that._

The first time he met Temperance Brennan he thought that woman is a psychopath; it’s going to be hell working for her.

As it turned out he was half right, though he never quite figured out which half.

One day, Brennan told him for the millionth time that she preferred not to jump to conclusions, and it hit him, that was what he’d been doing his entire life. He jumped and never looked back to stop and think about the facts, and he knew nothing about his parents, or his world, or himself.

She taught him how to be a better scientist, which was all Jack cared about, at first. Then she taught him how to be a better human being, and he never looked at science the same way again.

Sometimes Angela would say to him with sad eyes, “I just don’t think she understands. I just want her to be happy, Jack,” and Jack would think about the way Brennan would fall back on “I don’t know what that means,” the same way Jack fell back on his conspiracies. He thought about the look on her face whenever she thought about her parents or Booth, and Jack _knew_ that expression, that everyone leaves me expression, because he had seen it on his own face so many times, and he knew that Brennan understood. She just didn’t realise that sometimes, sometimes people stay when they said they were going to.

It was a lesson Jack was still learning.

She also brought him Angela, for which he can never be thankful enough.

 

8.

 

Before Booth came along, Hodgins never looked up from his microscope except to complain about how the world was an awful, corrupt place.

He hated people like Booth, with their blind, sheep-like patriotic devotion to the government.

But he was wrong about Booth, and maybe that meant he was wrong about a lot of other things too. The longer he spent around Booth, the more he was beginning to think so. When he stopped to think about it, what awed Jack most about Booth was his continual ability to see the best in the world, and Booth caught murderers for a living.

He was also a soldier, and Hodgins never thought he would respect someone who fought for the government.

But he did. He respected Booth.

Jacked asked him once how he did it, how he got up every morning and believed the best in people even when they proved him wrong time and time again. Booth actually took him seriously, thinking about is response for a long time before answering. “I do it for my son,” he said simply with a shrug.

Hodgins didn’t understand.

He thought about that exchange, years later, after Angela said, “You’re going to be a dad, Jack,” and it made sense.

The world was different now. Or maybe Jack just hoped it was.

 

9.

 

The day Jack finally married Angela was the happiest day of his life.

“Who were the other Jack Hodginses” she asked later that night, after they had been released from prison, been thrown an impromptu wedding reception by their friends at the Founding Fathers, and finally (finally!) consummated their wedding.

“Hmm?” he said, stroking her hair. Angela was pressed up against him, her head laying on his bare chest, and Hodgins thought that he was actually impossible for him to be any happier than he was at that moment, lying in bed with his wife. His _wife_.

“He said Jack Stanley Hodgins IV. Who were the first three?” She looked up at him, her chin on his shoulder where his tattoo is. He knew she still hated it, but that only made him love it even more. She was there on his body and in his heart forever.

“My dad,” he said, thinking. “My grandfather. My great-grandfather.”

He felt Angela nod. “That’s a lot of history. A lot of family.”

He kissed the top of her head. “You’re my family, Angie.”

He meant it, but it was the first time in fifteen years he missed his parents. He thinks they would have liked Angela.

 

10.

 

The day Jack’s daughter is born he can’t imagine ever being angry again.

(He is, of course. It just seems smaller now, somehow.)


End file.
